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This is a pic from a National Geographic article about the fact that Arctic ice is at a record low this year. The purple line is the average August point for the years 1979 to 2000. The white is where the ice is now.

This is extra scary because:

The current ice coverage is well below the record low which was set in 2005

There is still a full month of melting this summer so things are only going to get worse

The current rate of melting is way faster than what was predicted by computer models

Frightening stuff. The thing is that climate is a complex adaptive system so this kind of thing could easily kick off a massive chain reaction of changes. I’ll blog about it sometime.

Anyway, this is why all sorts of Arctic countries are starting to stake claims to the Arctic. I recently posted about how a Russian expedition recently planted their flag on the seabed of the North Pole.

It seems a little random, but I thought I’d put up quick reviews when I finish interesting books. We’ll see it if lasts.

I just finished reading Peter Godwin’s latest book. His previous book about growing up in Rhodesia, Mukiwa, was really superb – try to get hold of it if you haven’t read it yet.

Mukiwa had a strong focus on what it was like growing up in Rhodesia, so I expected this book to be about what it’s like being in Zim as it falls apart now. There is quite a lot of that, but the book actually has two themes:

It’s mostly the story of the aging and eventual death of Peter’s father who was still living in Zimbabwe. I didn’t expect that, but it is written well and actually fairly powerful.

The decay and collapse of Zimbabwe from the late 90′s to now. I knew all this was happening but it was still interesting to get a well written personal account. Frightening too, considering I live just next door.

Basically, that is the popular answer to the question: can we really ever know something. Can we ever know that something is true without any doubt?

You might say that you know your name is Frank. But in fact you don’t really know that – you just think your name is Frank. You might in fact be completely insane.

There is no absolute proof of that truth without making some serious assumptions. If you are making assumptions, then you don’t know that you are right. Your assumptions might be wrong.

So what can you really know without making assumptions? René Descartes came up with the answer above. He reckons that he knows that he is thinking, therefore he knows that he exists.

Thing is, that he has made the assumption that if he thinks then he exists. I reckon that’s, not quite right. All you can really know is that there are thoughts. You think that they are your thoughts, but you don’t even know that. Everything else could be an illusion – including the fact that in order to have thoughts something must exist.

This article is about the Chinese rip-off industry – very interesting.

The article is basically discussing how far counterfeit goods have come in China. From poor quality t-shirts, now cars and serious electronics are also being copied. For instance when LG recently launched a new phone in China it didn’t sell because everyone already had a fake which worked just as well.

Maybe the real companies should push up volumes and make a little more money?

From the article:

Nearly every type of product can be—and is—cloned in China, sometimes so well that the ripped-off manufacturers inadvertently service the fakes when warranty claims come in.

In the south, one cloning operation didn’t just copy a technology company’s product line—it duplicated the entire company, creating a shadow enterprise with corporate headquarters, factories, and sales and support staff.

In the mid-’90s, developers began to build shadow factories—identical plants, often constructed from the same blueprints legitimate manufacturers used to launch their ventures. Sometimes the plans were sold by managers at the genuine facilities. Other times, local officials and organized crime conspired to create a second set of blueprints.

The cloners hire a team of between 20 and 40 engineers to begin decoding the circuit boards. At the same time, coders start to develop an operating system for the phone with a similar feature set. (The typical cloner either uses off-the-shelf code, writes something entirely new, or modifies a publicly available Linux-based system.) Both processes take about a month. By then, ancillary items—plastic casings, accessories, manuals and packaging—are ready as well.

When Samsung busted some of these cloners they were “impressed by the efficiency of the cloners, so much so that the company offered them jobs. The cloners said no. Earning about $1.25 per phone, the cloners said, they found it easier and more profitable to make fakes.”

Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the center of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock – no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.

Orwell was conscious through the whole thing and at one point he was convinced that he was dying:

There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed I was killed. And that too was interesting — I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it!

“Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example, with someone at the company’s IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry’s concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company’s CEO’s fund-raising for President Bush.”

Wal-Mart was more subtle, for example: “changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage”

There are lots of other examples – the whole thing is generating a lot of interest.